Characterising the sustainability performance of cyclic manufacturing processes: a hybrid manufacturing case

Abstract

The drive for ever-increasing materials and energy efficiency and associated cost savings has compelled manufacturers to adopt flexible and rapid production systems. The technical limitations and sustainability concerns of conventional unit processes and sequential process flows have led to widespread adoption of advanced manufacturing processes that exhibit cyclic nature, termed cyclic manufacturing processes. While cyclic manufacturing processes enable efficient production through reduced time-to-market, lower production costs, and shorter manufacturing process chains, relatively little attention has been paid toward characterising their associated environmental, economic, and social impacts. A holistic manufacturing process modelling framework is developed to support sustainability performance characterisation of cyclic manufacturing processes. The developed framework enables model reusability, extensibility, and composability to characterise, assess, and extract product and process sustainability information. It is applied to characterise environmental impacts of a low-cost, hybrid (additive-subtractive) process for production of polylactide (PLA) parts, and compared with a conventional subtractive process (milling).